


Better Not Think I Find the Bearing of Witness Endearing

by scioscribe



Category: Deadwood
Genre: M/M, Post-Series, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-09 14:36:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8894452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “What better cheers a humble locale than seeing its luminaries shine on its behalf?”Al laughed and slammed his own shot-glass down on the bar with a hard, resonating clink. “You’ve succumbed to age, Jack, and to fucking repetition, the habit I most despise. Amateur night again, is that it?”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Plaid_Slytherin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Plaid_Slytherin/gifts).



> [The song of Jack's recollection](http://www.contemplator.com/england/longago.html) is real and indeed, as Jack notes, sentimental. But appropriate.
> 
> Happy Yuletide, and I hope you'll enjoy!

“It’s my considered opinion the town could do with being roused,” Jack said.

“Sure, roused to stand in their trousers and come the fuck over this way, led on by their pricks like dowsing rods. Never in all my fucking life have I seen despair so listless whiskey, cunt, and faro wouldn’t put it right-side again and these cocksuckers hang their heads in the streets and suffer _my_ coffers to run to empty, all on account of fucking Hearst.” Al topped off Jack’s glass with a precise tilt of his wrist. “And you ain’t drinking on a fucking tab.”

“A pleasure,” Jack said, “to lay my elbows on a bar such as yours and know, well-polished as it is, I’ll not trail my sleeves through spilled drink or worse, vomit, so I can come close enough to tell you my heart is broken.” He leaned back and tossed off the shot; felt that loosening burn spread through his chest. He wanted not drunkenness—a cultivated faux-carelessness was all he could afford in these days and climes, not a genuine stagger and loss of faculties—but _mellowness_. And whatever others thought, Jack had always been able to seek out Al Swearengen for such and see himself fulfilled.

“With us being of old acquaintance, you leap, arms pinwheeling like a man on the edge of a cliff, to you being allowed unlimited credit?”

“Old _friendship_ , I should say, and also I recollect seeing several more disreputable than I ensconced in this very place drinking and even fucking with not a penny to their names.”

“Hard fucking times, Jack.” But there was, despite it all, something about Al’s face that suggested solace would not elude Jack this evening, no more than it had back in Virginia City. “Lay on whatever speech you had planned about this proposed rousing of all our long-faced, woe-is-fucking-me cocksucker populace and have done with it.”

“What better cheers a humble locale than seeing its luminaries shine on its behalf?”

Al laughed and slammed his own shot-glass down on the bar with a hard, resonating clink. “You’ve succumbed to age, Jack, and to fucking repetition, the habit I most despise. Amateur night again, is that it?”

“You misjudge me completely.”

“Oh, that I doubt.”

It was Al’s turn then to lean forward on the bar, putting his head closer to Jack’s: Jack took pleasure even in just looking, which he was by no means sure Al knew. But what a sight—instantly recognizable even on this far side of their history as the young man he’d been, but unlike Jack himself, improved somehow by time, grown from cutthroat to lion. Weathered and burnished and beaten into something really quite sublime. It wasn’t only the flesh, though God knew Jack was fond of it—the lick of dark hair over the back of Al’s collar, the wide span of his hands, the arch of his brow—but the glory of winning his attention and, better still, his _relaxation_. His _inclination_.

“You really get off on that, do you?” Al said. “Bringing in a crowd to balance beams on their chins and lick the tips of their own cocks and warble like songbirds? They come out all aglow, Jack, talking like you’ve praised them to the highest of heavens and are one hour away from hiring them yourself.”

“Do you envy the number of things I delight in?”

“As far as the hooples go? I say you and every fucking one of us had best take pleasure where we can fucking find it.” Speaking of the arch of his brow.

“In any case,” Jack said, settling into the conversation as he would into a chess game, caressing each word like he would the sanded wood of a pawn, “you’ve outpaced my own explanation of myself. Not an amateur night, no. I had rather thought of some _particular_ performances, reserved of course in advance.”

“By your designated luminaries.”

“We are now of one mind.”

“I should be extraordinarily surprised by that. When, I would wonder, will the rain of blood appear, that we stand at the end of things, up being down and down up and so forth?”

“What you want, surely,” Jack said, “is reassurance that I’ve come to you first, and I fucking have.”

“And having come, can fucking exit.”

“I suppose our former sheriff, if pressed to momentary goodwill despite his troubles, is a man possessed of hidden talents he might be persuaded to display.”

“Sure,” Al said, “bring him up on-stage and he’ll shoot a glare that will rend the vulnerable and slow-witted at twenty paces and then a bullet that will rend those contemptuous of the first at further still than that.”

“He’s melodic of speech when he talks above a growl,” Jack said. “I project upon him a fine singing voice, accordingly, and propose he cheer himself and his fellows by going forth and fucking employing it.”

“Don’t be fooled by fashion-plate looks. However sweet a voice you think you sense, I’ll bet every dollar and piece of pussy under my roof that fucking Bullock has never yet unclenched his jaw enough to sing any clef, fucking bass or fucking treble.”

“Then I suppose I have recourse only to you. And _your_ voice, Al, I know well.”

Al spun the glass around on the bar: when its edge hit a scratch in the wood, it would glide, just momentarily, until his hand forced it to resume its orbit. Jack was always ascribing some sort of poetry to him—had taught it to him, in Virginia City, had lain in bed with him in some rare and chancy hour of solitude and told him about violent delights that had violent ends. (“Should I take that as a warning about you, Jack, or about my worse fucking habits?” And Jack had said, “You should take it, you uncouth degenerate, as _Shakespeare_ ,” and brought his foot down the length of Al’s bare leg, moving from embrace to straddle with a limberness he looked back on somewhat longingly. Though solitude, at their age, with their comforts, was now thankfully easier to find and trust.) So there was that history of Jack thinking this man ought to be at least partly in verse, each thing about him deliberate, _crafted_ , for some great agony or beauty. An illusion Al, if told about, would no doubt long to spoil, so Jack had no intention of telling him.

An earthy poetry, true, but poetry all the same, and that roll of the glass—the relentless gravity of Al’s hand pulling it again into tune—was indeed very fine, to an eye with an appreciation of art subtler than his own theater was ever called to provide.

“Since, having met me, you know with some exactitude what a fool’s fucking errand _that_ request would be—”

“The song?”

“The fucking song, yeah—I am forced from desperate hope to conclude that you came here with some other object. And all this foofaraw is so much distraction and fucking misdirection, like you aim to be a magician with some fucking rabbit, and _there’s_ your amateur night, Jack, because all you’ve done in this case is put your hand up your own asshole and come up holding bullshit, a neat trick, to be sure, but not a persuasive one.”

“Not persuasive as to the singing,” Jack said, “but were it misdirection, doubtless its gradual revelation as bullshit would be my fucking intent, would it not?”

Al flashed him a hard grin—an unlovely grin, for all it went directly to Jack’s cock and throbbed there, and elsewhere in him as well, because it was quite the fishhook Al had sunk into him back there in Montana, to reel him in this way after so long, with so many other catches in between that ought to have distracted him better. He had to hope—preferred to believe—that it was something the same for Al. He rather expected it was, and didn’t think that was so much vanity. Al Swearengen was not a man to take a stupid risk, let alone take it to bed with him. To fuck a whore was safe; to fuck a friend was something else. Written off easily, Jack supposed, by men not so pretty even in their winter days as them, and less surrounded by tits and easily-bought cunny—“Well, it’ll save on money, that’s one fucking way of looking at it,” was what Al had said to him the first time, his hand hot against Jack’s skin—but only with great difficulty in their present circumstances. They had fewer excuses. Fewer _misdirections_.

Not so few, though, that they could not have this chessboard, this checkmate, this odd and somehow welcome _play_.

“I may have come, on this rainy day, with your trade so poor that yonder drunk asleep face-down in what I must say is an especially generous bosom—”

“Compliments of Mr. Jack Langrishe on your tits, Hildy!” Al said, with a tipped salute.

“Had 'em my whole life and ain’t tired of them yet,” she said, without even a glance up from the copy of the _Pioneer_ she was reading atop her customer’s inebriated head.

“I may have come, prior to fucking interruption, to remind you a voice like yours is not to be neglected.”

“You having knowledge of such.”

“Cultivated expertise. And you _do_ sing, Al, which I can testify to with my own ears.”

“Better not think I find the bearing of witness endearing, for men have had their throats opened for less.”

“As you’ll recollect, I didn’t spy, but came by the sound honestly.”

“Trust a theater man to talk about ‘honesty’ and I’ll soon lose track of all my fucking English, having drowned in participles and fucking poesy.” He poured them each another drink and this time capped the bottle firmly and slid it back beneath the bar, with the air of a man taking off his boots to settle in at the end of a long day. “Drink your drink, Jack, and see if, with your memory so machine-oil slick, you can remember what fucking song I sang for you that night, because loath as I am to admit it, the escape of that fact has troubled me for fucking years.”

“It was ‘Long, Long Ago.’”

“Bringing to mind _when_ the fuck I sang it ain’t my fucking problem.”

“The name of the song, Al, not the relevant date, if you’d use your head and realize I’d not be so fucking vague as that, not being doddering of old age and still too steady-handed to be properly drunk. A sentimental tune, which is why I committed it to memory, surprised you’d scrape the irony off yourself long enough to learn it in the first place.”

“And you’ve thought of that, huh, over the years?”

“Oh, every so often. A man doesn’t meet many people worth meeting twice.”

“That he fucking does not.” Al tapped a slight rhythm against the bar, his face softened just slightly in reverie, as though it were the surf wearing down the cliffside. “ ‘Do you remember the paths where we met? Long, long ago, long, long ago. Ah, yes, you told me you’d never forget, long, long ago, long ago. Then to all others, my smile you preferred’—and I fucking forget the rest, it not being no ‘Red River Valley.’ As to my knowing it, I’ve no explanation, but as to the performance, I was fucking shitfaced.”

“I recall two shots, and you having a good head for liquor even then.”

“I was somewhat inclined to impress, which is its own fucking form of drunkenness and stupidity and one far keener than booze or even a blow to the head.”

(“In another life, Jack, you’d take me on, and I’d paint my hands red with stage-blood and beguile the masses with my fucking silver tongue.”

“Who the fuck says the masses would have any part of your tongue if it were up to me?”

“As my employer, in this imagining, you’d doubtless be required to keep your hand out of the company till and off the company cock, and I’d entertain myself, fucking bewitching you from a distance and putting my cock in whoever I’d like.”

“A pretty picture indeed. And why would I make a hire so like to lead to wantonness and me having only the company of my own fist on all those nights?”

“You’d doubtless despair over it,” Al said, “but make fucking contract with me all the same on account of my voice and you being so constantly fucking hard-up for singers in the masculine line who aren’t so fucking fragile they faint at the stench of a fart from the crowd.”

“For the fucking life of me, I cannot imagine you singing,” Jack said, as a prod.

Al had known it for that, to a certainty, but he wasn’t a man to easily resist a challenge, especially not one tied like a ribbon around the prospect of a good fuck, so sung he had—first loudly and then softly.)

“We differ on the question of your motivations,” Jack said. “For it was to prove a fucking point, as I remember.”

“Knowing what was in my own head as I am occasionally granted by God the grace and wisdom to do, I think I carry the day on why I made like a dove and fucking cooed, to my eternal fucking shame.”

“All right, Al,” he said, no more than mildly perplexed by it. His native language was charm, which gave him some converse understanding of violence—them being, as Al had once told him, skin and blood in relation to each other, the former revealing the latter when sufficiently pricked—but as to inner workings, he deferred. And Al was not a simple man. Neither of them were. Strive too fucking hard to hold this particular moonbeam, however tantalizing, and he’d lose sight of his prize.

Which was something more, perhaps, than mellowness, if he were that fucking inclined to sentimentality. And, remembering the song as he did, he supposed he was.

“Fucking all right _is_ all right,” Al said. “But come upstairs if you’re fucking coming and we’ll see if I can still carry a fucking tune. I abuse the word, you understand, as preface to the fucking act, which will come with no singing, unless you’re inclined to hit high notes in the throes of fucking ecstasy.”

“With my keen appreciation for language,” Jack said, going up behind him on the stairs, “I follow completely.”

“Above the landing I abandon subtlety, you see, up here it’s all pricks and razor blades. And no prying ears, for that matter.”

“It’s an unimaginative man who makes of melody a fucking pretext.”

“Fucking wordplay, is it?” Al opened the door to his office and, past that, the door to his room, revealing an unmade and rumpled bed and a shuttered balcony door that threw slants of light sideways across it like outstretched fingers. “Not that I might not be persuaded to bring to mind a line or two, you play your cards that fucking well.” A kiss, then, their first in years, and it brought to mind the first in truth, the one it had taken Jack so long to win from him, the one Al had been somehow shy of though he’d not been shy of anything else.

Jack put a hand against his cheek. “Anticipation is the keenest and most savory of favors, truly.”

“Anticipation,” Al said, “ _truly_ , we’ve fucking _had_.”


End file.
